The Lightbulb Paradox: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments

NBER Working Paper No. 19713Issued in December 2013, Revised in August 2014

---- Acknowledgements ----

We are grateful to Raj Chetty, Lucas Davis, Stefano DellaVigna, Mushfiq Mubarak, Sendhil Mullainathan, Emmanuel Saez, Josh Schwartzstein, and other colleagues, as well as seminar audiences at the ASSA Annual Meeting, the Behavioral Economics Annual Meeting, Berkeley, the European Summer Symposium for Economic Theory, Harvard, the NBER Public Economics Meetings, Resources for the Future, Stanford, the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, UCLA, the University of California Energy Institute, and the University of Chicago for constructive feedback. We thank our research assistants - Jeremiah Hair, Nina Yang, and Tiffany Yee - as well as management at the partner company, for their work on the in-store experiment. Thanks to Stefan Subias, Benjamin DiPaola, and Poom Nukulkij at GfK for their work on the TESS experiment. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation for financial support. Files containing code for replication, the in-store experiment protocol, and audio for the TESS experiment can be downloaded from Hunt Allcott's website. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.